Category “Go To Work”

I’ve been wrestling with what to do now that Lil Mil is practically a grown up (22 months, people! what is going on with time racing by?!?) and I’ve finished my novel. I want to keep blogging (my recent hiatus has been like not working out for a few months… I thought about it less and less as time went on, but four months later, I feel slothy and slobby and out of shape – do I even know how to do this anymore?), but this site no longer feels like the right place to do it. Embrace the Detour was, in its design, a time-limited project. An “experiment in creativity and productivity,” I always said. One that I’m so glad I took – I ended up with a novel I’m proud of and hundreds of blog posts commemorating my daughter’s first days of life.

But now it’s time for a new journey. Or, at least, a new phase in the one I’m already on. I want this site to remain the repository for all the posts I wrote and detour stories I collected, and I want people to click around and explore. But from now on, my new posts will appear HERE. If you’re on the ETD email distribution list, you’ll keep getting posts, originated from my new site.

I hope you’ll stay with me on this journey. You’ll be hearing from me more often, but the posts will be shorter. I’ll be keeping you updated on my writing projects (for now, Parallel, the not-yet-titled-Book-2 (not a sequel to Parallel) and TEACH, the TV pilot my writing partner and I sold to ABCF, but hopefully there will be more to tell you about soon!), and doing a lot of what I did here – musing about life and love and identity and motherhood and the juggling act of work/home/everything in between. So it’ll be the same. But different.

Any day now, Lil Mil will take her first steps. Someone will be there to see it.

It won’t be me.

Yes, I’m being pessimistic, but I’m also going with the odds. During the week, I see my daughter for about two hours every morning. Sometimes less. On the weekends, I’m with her all day, but we’re usually out doing stuff, so she doesn’t spend much time on her feet. It’s during the week, while I’m at work and she’s with S (the part-time babysitter who became our full-time nanny when we yanked Lil Mil out of daycare - see what you missed while I was away?) that she prances around the house, holding on to her wooden pushtoy, hamming it up for the applause she’s come to expect (if she doesn’t get it, she’ll plop down and clap for herself).

Most weeks, there’s at least a chance I’d be there to witness those monumental first steps. But this week, Lil Mil is with Mom and Dad for the week (mine, not hers), which means that if she decides to walk in the next six days, I will most certainly miss it.

Is it horrible that I’m willing my daughter not to walk just because I want to be there when she does?

Has it really been more than two months since my last post? Apparently so. The date stamp don’t lie.

What have I been doing with myself? Working. And…

Nope. Just working.

I’m not gonna lie. I do not wear a wild and happy grin most of the time. I wear it sometimes — like weekend mornings and the exceedingly rare weekday evenings when I manage to get home from work before Lil Mil goes to bed — but the rest of the time I wear the glazed half-smile (and by “half” I mean “totally fake”) of a person who is going through the motions. A person who spends the bulk of her day sitting bleary-eyed in front of a computer screen (a PC! Ick!), staring at a contract that needs drafting or an email that needs crafting, wondering what the amazing creature she used to spend every second with is doing. Without her.

Don’t get me wrong – I am happy. Wildly happy, in fact. My daughter is a giggly ball of curiousity who laughs more than she cries. My husband is an even better version of the completely awesome man I married 5 years ago next week. I’m working on a TV project that I’m exceptionally excited about. I’m shopping a novel I’m genuinely proud of.

The problem isn’t that I don’t like where I am or what I’m doing. The problem is that I don’t have the time or mental space to notice where I am or what I’m doing. I’m always either wholly occupied by work or wholly occupied by the desire to be somewhere other than work. And when I’m not at work, I’m working my way through my laughably long to-do list. I’ve given into the momentum of my life, letting it push me along. I’ve started drifting through my days, letting each day bleed into the next, not keeping track or taking note of milestones big or small.

No more.

Starting today, I’m back. Back to blogging, yes, but more than that, back to noticing. To reflecting. To relishing. To cherishing.

I’ve been putting off writing this post. I’ve been putting it off because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I’m still not. But now the day has arrived and if I don’t say something today, it will have come and gone without my saying anything.

I went back to work today.

After exactly seven months as a work-at-home writer, I am once again a go-to-work lawyer.

Yesterday, I sat cross-legged on my couch in tattered jeans and my favorite t-shirt, nursing an increasingly squirmy little girl while balancing a laptop on my knee. Today, I am sitting at an actual desk, wearing clothes that are refreshingly (and yet, heartbreakingly) free from drool, poop and vomit. I am wearing heels. I smell nice. I smell like me. In the past eight hours, I have used a myriad of multisyllabic words to people who have used them back.

I miss my baby.

I miss her less than I thought I would. I miss her in ways I didn’t expect.